HN Gopher Feed (2017-12-29) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
Why a 'paperless world' still hasn't happened
37 points by charlysl
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/29/american-reams-why-...___________________________________________________________________
post_break - 1 hours ago
I just want fax to go away.
tehlike - 31 minutes ago
What did you use it for last time?
tyingq - 20 minutes ago
It's still in big use in many spaces. Like withdrawal from a
401k, or sales orders from a manufacturer, etc. The hinge
seems to be that faxes are exempt from PCI/HIPPA and other
privacy regulations.
leipert - 10 minutes ago
Simple mails are not court admissible in Germany. So if you
want to submit something, e.g. a termination of an ISP
contract, the best way is a fax.
whack - 15 minutes ago
Anyone who thinks the world hasn't gone paperless, really needs to
recall how it used to be in the 80s and 90s.- We don't send
physical letters in envelopes anymore, we send emails.- We don't
send documents via fax or courier, we send them digitally.- We
don't apply for jobs by mailing in resumes, we apply online.- We
don't file taxes or other applications using snail mail, we send
them online.- We don't receive statements and invoices in our
mailbox, we get them in our inbox.- We don't send photocopies, we
send pictures.- We don't use checks or even currency notes, we use
credit cards.- We don't read physical newspapers, we read articles
online via HN.- We don't read physical books, we read e-books.Yes
yes, I know people still do some of the above things. But the
quantity of paper-use for the above has fallen precipitously, and
it's falling even further everyday.I still use pen-and-paper
occasionally to sketch out my thoughts in an unstructured way, and
I do like sending letters as a gesture of my extended effort. But
for any kind of business dealing or inter-person interaction, paper
is on life-support, and is going to be DOA in another decade or
two. And everytime I think of paper statements and requests for
photocopies to be mailed in, all I can say is good riddance.
mentos - 15 minutes ago
If we could snap our fingers and have ultra thin flexible
paperwhite lcd sheets how would they be best put to use?I could see
binding 100 of them together that you could 'flash' to create a
true e-book
crooked-v - 2 minutes ago
Star Trek comes to mind for me. PADDs, though (ironically enough)
bulkier and clunkier than any real-world tablet device today, are
treated as basically disposable. Characters are usually shown
with one at a time, but it's implied they can get as many as they
want, with a few scenes where a character has five or six PADDs
laid out to compare different texts in a physical way despite
them (presumably) all accessing the same data source.
cmurf - 9 minutes ago
I blame the lack of good open source tools for creating and
verifying signed PDF (or an alternative format).Faxes are deeply
misunderstood, I still occasionally have vendors and clients say
"we need an original" or "we need a signature" or some other brain
damaging excuse. And these aren't companies in the sticks that
don't know it's 2018, these are large (legacy) companies in big
cities.
ashark - 1 hours ago
See also: attempts to replace whiteboards/blackboards.
pavel_lishin - 1 hours ago
We bought some Cisco whiteboard thing at work. Great!
Collaborative whiteboarding with our team in Austin.Guess what
one fucking feature it didn't have?That's right! You couldn't
just dial another whiteboard on the network and start immediately
drawing together with another person.(Ironically, when I tried to
demonstrate this issue to one of our IT folks, the damn
smartboard refused to start right up because it needed to install
a firmware upgrade - that provided this functionality.)
tyingq - 49 minutes ago
Part of it might be generational. I'm older. Any time I'm in a
meeting with a presentation, I print it out and make margin notes
while the discussion happens.This really increases my recall and
understanding of what was discussed. I've tried digital
equivalents of this and it just doesn't work the same for me.I have
noticed that this type of thing is more prevalent with people in my
age group (40+). Writing things down, even if you throw it away
right afterwards, seems to increase recall more than typing it.
scroot - 27 minutes ago
> Writing things down, even if you throw it away right
afterwards, seems to increase recall more than typing it.Your
intuition here is spot on and backed up by actual
research:https://www.npr.org/2016/04/17/474525392/attention-
students-...
brucephillips - 22 minutes ago
All else being equal, yes. But the larger benefit of using
digital notes like org mode is the ability to apply structure to
notes that matches your mental model, thus strengthening your
mental model. It's hard to do this with paper without erasing.
unangst - 2 hours ago
Analog will always be practical.
charlysl - 13 hours ago
TLDR: sales decrease in paper for printing & writing more than
being offset by Amazon effect (packaging; food and drink too) &
tissue.
vinceguidry - 1 hours ago
It's quite simple. Paper is a near-perfect technology. What
replaces it has to be similarly perfect. When people look at what
replaces paper, they think screens. Screens are pretty-near perfect
too. But screens are not what replace paper. Files are. Screens
merely display information, files store it.And file storage and
manipulation is still in the Stone Age. It's about as far from
perfect as any technology can be. To kill paper you have to make it
perfectly easy for people to design applications without it.
Because it's already perfectly easy to design applications and
systems that use paper.We have to fix software development before
we can truly kill paper.
pishpash - 1 hours ago
Even as display it sucks. Where's the e-paper that was promised
decades ago?Paper (and pen) have stood the test of time for
thousands of years. Warped tech nuts believe they can be replaced
by substandard junk electronics. I'm glad consumers aren't so
gullible.
shrimp_emoji - 1 hours ago
What innovations in file storage and manipulation would
characterize a progression to the Bronze Age?
brendyn - 52 minutes ago
I'll cut in rudely with my own reply.Sharing files is
unbelievably inconvenient. Sharing files to my mum in the other
room involves copying files to a USB drive and moving them
manually, after I reformat a USB to ntfs or fat32. It doesn't
matter that both of our computers are on a LAN because by
default we have no pre-existing convenient ways to share files.
With her being on Windows and me being on GNU/Linux, I'm not
even sure which program I would pick if I could install one.
For anyone that isn't in USB drive proximity, I have to
brainstorm a solution every single time I want to share a file
for every person I want to give it too. This is all despite the
fact that theoretically, there are a million different ways
that we could share a file.
lsadam0 - 49 minutes ago
There are numerous better options than a usb drive: Email,
cloud storage, almost any messaging client, etc.
nradov - 43 minutes ago
Yes well that's kind of the problem isn't it? Too many
options and no default cross-platform standard.
lsadam0 - 32 minutes ago
All of the options I listed are cross platform. Why must
a standard exist in this case? FTP is standard and cross
platform. This is nothing more than a UX problem.
2muchcoffeeman - 28 minutes ago
Most alternatives are really inadequate, especially for
large files.When you are in the same room or even city, I
should be able to just move large amounts of data from one
computer to a physically adjacent computer without having
to go through the internet.For long distance transfers, I
agree with various cloud storage. Upload some files and
create a share link. But even this is an annoyance for a
large file.
lsadam0 - 23 minutes ago
AirDrop on Mac solves this problem. But how do you
propose getting Microsoft and Apple to implement a cross
platform standard when they have financial incentive to
not do so? Cloud storage is the best answer, even though
it is an extra technically unnecessary step for local
transfer. That said, Even my 60+ technically illiterate
mother can do it reliably. I think this is an excellent
example of letting ?perfect be the enemy of good enough?.
vinceguidry - 1 hours ago
I would say when files become easily storable and accessible.
Right now untold amounts of human labor are destroyed whenever
the computer systems those humans are using fail. When I think
about how most people use computers, I get the distinct feeling
like I'm watching an episode of Primitive Technologies.Systems
like Dropbox are a good first step, but the archival of files
is still far too complicated. This stuff needs to be easy
enough for your 80 year old grandma to master.I'd say we're
probably 20-50 years out. We're eventually going to figure out
a basic file format that all applications will use and extend.
Then it'll become necessary for all applications to support it.
It'll have solved the encoding problem, and it'll have built-in
error correction.Sort of a Unicode for file formats.Once that's
in place, then cloud storage and backup solutions will finally
become useful.
Splines - 1 hours ago
IMO one of the problems with cloud storage in general is how
complicated it is. There are so many moving parts and so
many things that could go wrong that there are inevitably
many states a file could be in and asking them to
troubleshoot these is impossible.For example, my wife is
syncing several GBs of data up to Google Photos as we speak.
Periodically, the sync process will complain about something
and stop. There is nothing we can do except ask it to exit
and we try again. What went wrong? Who knows. We certainly
don't. The app UI isn't telling us anything. So we cross
our fingers, restart the sync app and hope it works. This
isn't the future."A file" needs to be have the qualities we
need as a paper-replacement as an intrinsic property of
itself, not conceptual software design properties that are
merely abstractions.
mjevans - 1 hours ago
I conjecture that error detection (and recovery) are layers
beneath the file format it's self. They belong in the filing
system and storage layers within/under that.Application code
should never need to worry about error recovery.We're kind of
close to this for text files, if only Windows and related
programs would join the rest of the sane world. Stop adding
'BOM Marks' and just assume everything is UTF-8 (at least for
any txt file created after 2000 and all application
stdin/out/errs).However the biggest barrier here is a
complete disconnect between interested parties. Adobe wants
to make money and keeps 'pdf' locked away. It's also bad
because paper size is enforced, instead of having an aspect
ratio, and positioning for different elements. Even HTML
rendering isn't that simple, and NO designer is working using
those tools. Additionally that complexity is FAR above what
the average user can handle and WAY above what they want to
deal with even if they can.Any format which /is/ user
friendly will have to support things like 'drawings' /
sketches which may or may not be auto OCRed for searching.I'm
of the opinion that this won't really be solved until we have
//strong// AI to do transcription and formatting for the lazy
humans.
nradov - 41 minutes ago
Dropbox is fine until they go bankrupt or get acquired by
another company which isn't interested in acting as your
archive.
cryptoz - 1 hours ago
Not the OP, but 98% of the time that someone sends me a .key
file for a Mac Keynote presentation, my Keynote application is
out of date and cannot open the file. Additionally, it
sometimes cannot update either, unless other components are
updated, such as the entire OS itself.A bare minimum
requirement for me would be, "a computer can be reasonably
expected to open the file". Yes, a computer without the correct
application installed could not reasonably be expected to open
the file. But here is a computer, perfectly capable of
displaying the file, but choosing not to do so. Note that these
are not files that are created with the new Keynote that I may
not have installed. These are normal Keynote files created in
the same version I have - but now my version isn't good enough
to open files any more, it would seem.A piece of paper would
never do that.
kqr - 1 hours ago
> Yes, a computer without the correct application installed
could not reasonably be expected to open the file.I
disagree.I write my presentations in Org. Perfectly readable
even to peooole without Emacs.I do my accounting using
hledger. Perfectly readable etc.I do my $task using ${plain
text format}, peefectly readble even to people without ${tool
that helps me format the document nicely}. Etc.
wvenable - 59 minutes ago
Paper isn't perfect. For one thing, it costs a hell of a lot
more to store paper than to store digital files; we pay a huge
amount to store files offsite. And paper used for ephemeral
content is inherently wasteful.Paper is slowly but surely going
away. We just finished digitizing all our employee records; all
records from now on will be digital. We used to print reams of
reports and store them in filing cabinets, shelves, etc but we
don't do that anymore. We aren't paperless but it's been a slow
and steady march for decades now.
lisper - 10 minutes ago
> Paper is a near-perfect technologyPaper is far from perfect,
but it does have some features that certain business processes
have come to rely on which files lack. For example: the ability
to physically bind an authorization (a signature) to the
information that authorization is associated with by putting both
on the same sheet of paper.Paper also doesn't require batteries.
It's much more robust in the face of certain kinds of physical
abuse.But paper takes a lot more space to store, and it's a lot
harder to transfer from one place to another.
BjoernKW - 1 hours ago
While paper used to be the near-perfect technology for storing
and distributing non-ephemeral information nowadays this has been
turned on its head to the extent that using paper for these
purposes has become downright detrimental:Information stored on
paper in some filing cabinet in some office for all practical
purposes simply doesn't exist. It can't be easily searched,
retrieved or accessed by someone who's not in the same room and
doesn't exactly know what he's looking for. In other words: That
information is lost.Old habits unfortunately die hard, which is
why people still seem to be thinking that storing non-ephemeral
information or knowledge on paper is a good idea.
JumpCrisscross - 1 hours ago
> It can't be easily searched, retrieved or accessed by someone
who's not in the same room and doesn't exactly know what he's
looking forTo a lot of people in a lot of scenarios, that is a
feature. Modern cryptography has yet to match the ease of use,
comfort and security of a single piece of paper locked away
somewhere only you would think to look.
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vinceguidry - 1 hours ago
Information locked away on some local user's desktop also
doesn't exist. If information isn't stored on a dedicated
application-specific storage system staffed with people skilled
in it's use and repair, then it's the exact same thing.We can't
just take information and dump it on a block storage device. It
needs proper archival. This is the same with paper, only if you
lose the key to your file cabinet or the drawers stop sliding
so easily, you can still get at the information.If your RAID
backplane dies and you don't know how to fix it, you're in for
a bad day.There is a skillset you can learn to work with paper
more efficiently. But most people can muddle through without
those skills. Not so with digital.
enraged_camel - 1 hours ago
I work in this very field. My company sells enterprise
content management (ECM) software that helps organizations go
paperless.In my experience, it's not just about archival,
search and retrieval. The system also needs to have robust
automation capabilities, and be able to do things like
automatically rename the files in a consistent way based on
storage location, file content (text, voice, etc.), and
identify when people store things in the incorrect location
and correct those mistakes or at least flag the files for
manual correction.The other thing to realize is that
information doesn't get generated in a vacuum. It's generated
via various business processes. So if you can automate those
using software, and the automation routines are tied to the
content management system such that things are filed in the
correct location based on business process data (e.g. which
department initiated the process, who approved what, etc.)
then you're basically 80% of the way to paperlessness.
jamesjyu - 1 hours ago
I was recently researching some of things archivists have to
do, and the general consensus is that their skills are needed
even more in the digital age, not less, because it introduces
a whole host of new problems: files that fork, forgeries,
losing the ability to read old file formats, etc.There was
also a project by MoMA (I can't find the original article),
where they had to get a whole team together to create formats
that will ensure survival in the future by doing things like
including the instructions to view the format in a readable
way.
reaperducer - 37 minutes ago
Reminds me of a quote from the early days of the internet.
It went something like "The internet is like a library with
every book in the world. But all the books are on the
floor."
macspoofing - 1 hours ago
>Information locked away on some local user's desktop also
doesn't exist. If information isn't stored on a dedicated
application-specific storage system staffed with people
skilled in it's use and repair, then it's the exact same
thingOffice365, GSuite. Small and medium businesses have
options.
TeMPOraL - 20 minutes ago
Small and medium businesses can keep their documents like
this because the expected lifetime of those businesses is
less than time until major breaking change on the cloud
office suite platform (or its shutting down).
brucephillips - 14 minutes ago
This is a great point, and one of the reasons I doubt
there will be much demand for IPFS.
scroot - 1 hours ago
When you read about Kay's Dynabook idea (and get past how the
machine mockup looks) you see that he's essentially describing
the "computational equivalent" to paper. With such a medium, one
could create digital forms as easily as they draw printed forms
on paper. And we do not have these types of machines or systems
today.Additionally, there is no better read experience than
paper. And consider archiving: digital documents are much harder
to preserve than paper documents, and this has enormous
implications for public policy, history, and democracy.
jdietrich - 34 minutes ago
Office IT is almost uniformly terrible. I see a lot of companies
trying to achieve a paperless office, but very few spending the
money it takes to make it a reality.Paperless workers need two
large high-res monitors, not one crappy 21" 1080p monitor or a
laptop with a 1366x768 panel. They need at least one tablet with
a decent pen interface. They need a good document management
system. They need the training and support to make use of it all.
adamsea - 31 minutes ago
And, to add to what you're saying, paper is infinitely easier for
people to interact with. It's a physical, tangible object which
they can see, touch/feel, and manipulate just like every other
object in the world. The paper we use today is the product of
hundreds of years of iterative design - conscious, and otherwise.
Plus, of course, paper never runs out of batteries.I do though
believe we eventually will create computers which are as natural
for us to use as paper is today.